“What if They(tm) Do What We Did?”

Yesterday, August 6, 2005, was spent among friends revelling outside, sitting around the bonfire, playing music, and generally celebrating. This is in stark contrast to those who happened to be living their lives in Hiroshima, Japan, exactly 60 years previously. Those people, no matter what their plans for the day were, may have noticed an airplane flying overhead around quarter after 8 in the morning; shortly thereafter there would have been a bright flash. People who saw the flash would have been instantly vaporized by the heat, torn apart by the shock wave, or left to slowly die in agony from radiation poisoning. Before it was over, 140,000 people were dead, not including the countless people whose lives were degenerated by the radioactive poison in the Hiroshima ecosystem for decades after the blast.

This, of course, was the first ever use (and along with the Nagasaki blast a few days later, the only time such weapons have been used) of a nuclear warhead. This event would, of course, change foreign relations for decades to come. The biggest
impact of this event, I believe, is that the world had to come to terms with the idea that when dealing with the United States government, the world was dealing with a government that was without question willing to use nuclear weapons to further its agenda.

Think about that for a moment.

We who were raised and educated in the US were programmed to believe that Truman made the decision to drop the weapons in order to hasten the end of the war, to save “1 million lives” that would be lost when the US tried to invade mainland Japan. As if instantly vaporizing over a hundred thousand people can be rationalized away.

And even more twisted is the fear of nuclear attack from the “Ruskies” that proliferated all through the cold war. The main fear is that They(tm) would do to us what We(tm) have been unafraid to do to others.